The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  Hap Arnold learned that most of his air crews were safe before Doolittle reached Chuchow. On April 19 the following telegraph cable was routed through various wire services:

  MISSION TO BOMB TOKYO HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED. ON ENTERING CHINA WE RAN INTO BAD WEATHER AND IT IS FEARED THAT ALL PLANES CRASHED. UP TO PRESENT ALREADY FIVE FLIERS ARE SAFE. DOOLITTLE.

  This was, of course, distressing news—all sixteen planes lost and possibly most of their crews as well? That wasn’t something either Arnold or Marshall wanted to tell Roosevelt, let alone the public. Arnold soft-pedaled it to the president for the moment, saying more solid information was needed.

  Meanwhile, Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the time deputy chief of staff for the Pacific and Far East, reported that his experts believed it would be imperative for Japan to retaliate against the United States in a major way and suggested the possibility of an attack on the Panama Canal, even on Washington, D.C.17 At this, the army seemed to panic. California radio stations were ordered off the air so Japanese planes couldn’t use their broadcast signals to home in on as they had at Pearl Harbor. In San Francisco the bridges, including the Golden Gate, were temporarily closed down. Hundreds of thousands of gas masks were shipped to the West Coast.

  During the next few days, as more of Doolittle’s crews were found, the picture became brighter, but the military and the White House continued to drape a cloak of secrecy over the incident. One reason was fear of reprisals in China, as well as an odd notion that American authorities could somehow disguise the method in which the attack was carried out.

  When reporters continued to demand answers about how the planes came to reach the Japanese mainland, Roosevelt told them mysteriously, while flipping his famous cigarette holder Groucho Marx–style, “They came from Shangri-la.”e

  As more information about the attack was revealed in the press, Americans became delighted. General George Marshall wrote Doolittle a felicitous message: “The president sends his thanks and congratulations to you and your command for the highly courageous manner,” and so forth. Hap Arnold cabled that he was awarding the Distinguished Flying Cross to all the raiders. Halsey sent Doolittle a glowing letter, which began “The takeoff was splendid!” and went on in that vein employing the adjective “gallant” several times, before closing with a typical Halsey flourish, “Keep on knocking over those yellow bastards.”

  In time, as more details emerged, the press people began to celebrate the Doolittle raid nearly on a par with Lindbergh’s landing in Paris and so were clamoring for his return to the United States. The story was fodder for newsreels and radio and rated banner headlines in all the newspapers. Doolittle was soon featured on the covers of popular magazines such as Life and Look. As a high-ranking army officer Doolittle, who shared Lindbergh’s mistrust of the press, was spared the sort of mobbing and stalking that Slim and Anne had endured.

  The raid at last produced the morale boost for the American people that Roosevelt and Hap Arnold had envisioned, and it proved, unfortunately for the Japanese, a promise of things to come.

  In China, meanwhile, the enraged Japanese took out their wrath on the civilian population. Emperor Hirohito himself approved orders for a punitive bloodbath against all Chinese—men, women, and children—in the areas where the Doolittle raiders had come down and were helped to safety. In a three-month carnival of boiling vengeance that is almost beyond comprehension, a hundred thousand Japanese soldiers marched into the region and slaughtered an estimated quarter of a million Chinese. They ordered Chinese laborers to ditch up all the landing fields, then gunned them down while they rested on their shovels. They burned entire towns because they didn’t like the “attitude of the population.” Their barbarism seemed to know no bounds. An old man, for instance, a schoolteacher, who had given some of the Americans food, told two Catholic priests how the Japanese had “killed my three sons; they killed my wife, Ansing; they set fire to my school; they burned my books; they killed my grandchildren and threw them in the well.” The schoolteacher himself escaped death only by hiding in the well with his slain grandchildren. Another man was immolated by being wrapped in a kerosene-drenched blanket that laughing Japanese soldiers then ordered his wife at gunpoint to set afire.18

  DOOLITTLE BEGAN HIS LONG VOYAGE HOME on a China National Aviation DC-3 piloted by one Moon Chin, a native of Baltimore, en route to Myitkyina, Burma, which at the time, unbeknownst to the pilot or to Doolittle, was under attack by Japanese fighter planes. Waved off until the attack ended, they arrived during a near riot, with the airport mobbed by people seeking to fly to safety. To Doolittle’s extreme consternation, Chin allowed more than seventy refugees on the plane, which was rated to carry not more than twenty-one passengers. He explained to Doolittle, “We are fighting a war over here. You do lots of things here you wouldn’t do at home.”

  Somehow the plane got off the ground and after an excruciating four-hour flight they landed in Calcutta, where Doolittle tried in vain to find a proper general’s uniform to replace his soiled khaki flying suit. At length he was reduced to using a native tailor who, after taking measurements, produced a khaki bush jacket with short pants, knee socks, and a pith helmet. Since Doolittle was due to take off on the next leg of his return trip, he was compelled to accept this ridiculous costume before boarding a British Overseas Airways flying boat to Cairo.

  From Cairo he flew to Khartoum in the Sudan, Dakar in Senegal, across the Atlantic to Brazil, and thence to Puerto Rico. In each of these places his attire more or less fit in with local custom. But from Puerto Rico he arrived on May 18 at Bolling Field in Washington, D.C., where he was met by a staff car sent by Hap Arnold.

  Arnold pretended to ignore Doolittle’s “weird getup” when he appeared in his office doorway and saluted, carrying the pith helmet under his arm, and shushed him when Doolittle began to apologize for losing the planes. Arnold assured him no blame would ever attach to him for that. The two of them then went to General Marshall’s office where Doolittle was greeted by a “big smile,” which he remembered years afterward because it was so rare. After a brief discussion of the raid, Arnold suggested that Doolittle go to the uniform store and acquire some clothing that more properly befitted a new brigadier general, then ordered him to retire to his Georgetown apartment and stay there, “incommunicado,” until further notice.

  Doolittle did exactly as he was told. He wanted badly to call Joe, who was on the West Coast staying with her mother, but didn’t dare after what Hap Arnold had told him. Next morning Arnold phoned and said a car would pick him up in an hour. When the car arrived, Doolittle was astonished that it contained not only Hap but George Marshall as well.

  With the three of them sitting in the backseat they rode off in silence until Doolittle inquired where they were headed.

  “We are going to the White House,” Arnold said.

  “What are we going to do there?” Doolittle asked.

  “The president is going to give you the Medal of Honor,” said Marshall.

  Doolittle was astounded. He began to protest that the medal “should be reserved for those who risk their lives trying to save somebody else.” He continued by praising all of his men; he even suggested that the threshold for receiving the honor had been lowered in recent years. As he spoke, however, Doolittle noticed that Arnold was beginning to look pained and that Marshall was actually scowling.

  I cannot get into trouble by keeping my mouth shut, Doolittle thought, but this proved beyond him. “I don’t think I’m entitled to the Medal of Honor,” he said.

  “I happen to think you are,” Marshall said icily.

  They rode on in stony silence while Doolittle blanched at the gaffe he had just made. “The highest ranking man in army uniform had made his decision. It was neither the time nor the place for me to argue.”

  When they reached the White House and were shown into a parlor next to Roosevelt’s office, Doolittle was stunned to find Joe waiting there. Marshall had arranged for her to be flown in from Los A
ngeles, although after a seventeen-hour trip with several changes of planes and no lavatories she remarked that she “looked like a carpetbagger.”

  Bantering with White House reporters, Doolittle truthfully told them that none of his planes had been shot down over Japan and that all but one had reached their destinations, which were “somewhere in China.”f He glossed over the rest of it “for security reasons.”

  Roosevelt was ebullient when Doolittle and the big air bosses came into his office. He had been told nothing of the raid until after the bombers had left Hornet. It was just the kind of thing he felt the country needed, for ever since the United States got into the war there had been bad news everywhere, and the American strike on Tokyo was an enormously uplifting symbol—a direct attack on the heart of the enemy homeland within weeks of the initial Japanese affront.

  Marshall read the citation aloud while photographers took pictures, then handed the scroll to Joe. Doolittle had to lean over so the seated president could pin the medal on him, but because he was only five-foot-four he didn’t have very far to lean (much later, Doolittle admitted that he always said he was five-six because it made him feel taller).

  In the excitement Joe absently began to twist the citation scroll in her hands so hard that Marshall was tempted to take it away from her. Her single regret was that in all the pomp and circumstance she forgot to ask Roosevelt for his autograph so she could embroider it on her getting-to-be-fabulous tablecloth.

  WHEN THE DAMAGE CAUSED by the raid was initially assessed by the Japanese Demolition Ministry, it was found that about ninety buildings in the Japanese target cities were completely destroyed. Nearly all were military targets such as Factory Number 1 of the Japanese Steel Corporation, the Japanese Diesel Manufacturing Company, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Corporation, the Nagoya Aircraft Factory, a military arsenal, the Yokohama Naval Docks, the Yokohama Manufacturing Company, and so forth. The report also said that about fifty people were killed and two hundred and fifty injured, mostly civilians. An army hospital in Nagoya was bombed, according to Japanese newspapers, as were schools and neighborhood homes in the vicinity of the attacks.19

  Compared with the later U.S. air raids on Japan this was minuscule. Each of the sixteen raiders’ planes carried one ton of bombs; by the end of the war American warplanes were dropping seventeen hundred tons of bombs a day on Japanese cities. During one raid alone in 1945, using conventional bombs, it was estimated that eighty-eight thousand Japanese were killed and six square miles of Tokyo were completely destroyed.

  But the Doolittle raid, as it has come to be called, would have consequences far beyond its modest intentions. Not only did the Japanese military recall many of their forces from other war zones in the Pacific and Asia to protect the homeland from further U.S. attacks, but there was also immense political pressure on Admiral Yamamoto to push Japan’s eastern defensive perimeter out another thousand miles. The centerpiece of this maneuver would be an attempt to capture Midway Island, a scant 1,250 miles from Pearl Harbor. Midway was the Allies’ lone and farthest outpost in the central Pacific, from where U.S. scout planes constantly patrolled to warn of Japanese naval movements.

  Yamamoto planned to lure the remainder of the American fleet to its doom. First he would stage an attack on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, then attack Midway to bring U.S. carriers out of Pearl Harbor. He would be lying in wait in his trap when they arrived.

  It was a complex scheme and, like the Doolittle raid, required complete secrecy. What Yamamoto didn’t know, even on the eve of the battle, was that his plan wasn’t secret anymore—and the reason, in large measure, was because of Doolittle’s raid.20

  American intelligence, and in particular one naval officer, the eccentric forty-three-year-old Lieutenant Commander J. J. Rochefort, had been working for years to break the complex Japanese naval code. His team had unraveled bits and pieces but were stymied by the nearly continuous radio silence imposed by Yamamoto on the Japanese fleet. Doolittle’s shocking attack changed all of that. For several hours during and after the raid, a terrific amount of Japanese naval radio traffic went out, and all of it was just as quickly plucked from the airways by Allied listening stations and sent to Rochefort’s headquarters at Pearl Harbor, where teams of code breakers and intelligence analysts worked around the clock putting the pieces together. Before Doolittle’s raid, Rochefort’s team had managed to decipher some 10 percent of the code; a week after the raid they were reading half of it. By the end of May, about the time that Doolittle was getting his Medal of Honor, Rochefort’s people were reading nearly all of it.

  Rochefort scored his coup de grâce on the Japanese when he tricked them into commenting on a fake water supply problem on Midway Island just two weeks before Yamamoto set sail. Rochefort wanted to be positive that Midway was the target and he believed the Japanese code signal for the island was “AF.” So he had his radio operator on Midway send a message saying something was wrong with the island’s fresh water system and sure enough, in a day or so, Rochefort’s radio operators intercepted a Japanese signal saying the Americans were having water problems at “AF.”

  Rochefort now knew that the Japanese planned to move on Midway and the Aleutians, but he had not yet discovered when the attack would occur. Up until May 27, almost the last day the U.S. Pacific Fleet could act, the code breakers had not succeeded in cracking the ultrasecret cipher that contained this information. Then Lieutenant Commander Wesley A. Wright, one of the senior cryptologists, took a crack at it.

  It was a feat of staggering complexity. Late into the night Wright worked it out. The date-and-time cipher used by the Japanese “comprised a polyalphabetic with independent mixed-cipher alphabets and with the exterior plain and key alphabets in two different systems of Japanese syllabic writing—one the older, formal kata kana, the other the cursive hira gana. Each has 47 syllables, making the polyalphabetic tableau a gigantic one of 2,209 cells, more than three times as extensive as the ordinary Vigenère tableau of 676 cells. Nevertheless, by about 5:30 the next morning he had a solution.”21

  Commander Wright’s decipher informed Admiral Nimitz that the Japanese planned to open their attack on the Aleutians at dawn, June 2, and attack Midway at daybreak, June 3. This priceless information was obtained only by an eyelash: Japanese intelligence, already fearing that radio traffic during the Doolittle raid may have compromised its military’s secret encryptions, had planned to change the code on May 1, but owing to bureaucratic delays the change was postponed until June 1.

  The rest is history. On May 30 the U.S. carrier task force of Hornet, Enterprise, and Yorktown steamed from Pearl Harbor toward Midway.g On June 4, 1942, a Thursday, the Americans ambushed and annihilated the Japanese fleet. Four enemy carriers were sunk, a blow from which the Japanese never recovered and never again regained the initiative in the Pacific. Nearly five thousand Japanese sailors died, including many of Japan’s best pilots. Midway is generally considered the turning point in the war against Japan,h and much of it was due, in no small measure, to the fact that the Doolittle raid had prompted the attack on Midway in the first place—and, as a direct result of the raid, the Japanese hadn’t the foggiest notion that U.S. intelligence was reading their mail.

  * Vixen had been the private yacht of Julius Forstmann, a wealthy German-American wool dealer and father of the late colorful venture capitalist Theodore “Teddy” Forstmann.

  † King’s own daughter said of him, “He is the most even-tempered officer in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage.” Upon his promotion to admiral, King is said to have remarked of himself, “When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches.”

  ‡ West Point class of ’07, Arnold had been one of the army’s first two pilots—taught to fly in 1911 by Wilbur and Orville Wright themselves.

  § Despite the drawbacks of King’s personality, it has been suggested by historians more than once that he was among the most brilliant naval officers of the era.

 
‖ Halsey’s friends called him Bill, not “Bull,” but owing to some mix-up in communication a journalist’s cable had once misidentified Halsey as “Bull” and the nickname stuck in the press.

  a This proved to be the new, nearly finished Japanese aircraft carrier Ryuho.

  b When he returned to the United States Lawson wrote the best-selling book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, published in 1943 and made into a hit movie the following year.

  c The two men who perished at sea were lost, but Doolittle went to great lengths to see that the raider killed in the jump, Corporal Leland D. Faktor, of Plymouth, Iowa, received a proper burial.

  d Doolittle, who had been trying to send messages, arrived a few minutes late to find that there was no medal for him. Through some mix-up it had already been presented to his second in command. Upon learning this, Chiang snatched a handsome medal off the uniform of one of his generals and pinned it on Doolittle’s chest.

  e The legendary Himalayan kingdom in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, and also the name of the presidential retreat in Maryland, now known as Camp David.

  f Shortly after the B-25 landed in Russia the Kremlin contacted the United States reporting that the plane and its crew were “interned,” and that it was a matter of great secrecy. A few days later the Kremlin announced to the world that the plane was in Russia.

  g But without the indomitable Halsey, who was in the hospital with a painful rash. In his stead, Nimitz selected fifty-six-year-old Admiral Raymond Spruance (Annapolis, Class of 1907), who was not an aviator, and had never commanded a carrier let alone a carrier fleet, but he had good sense and good deputies.

  h Yorktown, however, was lost in the action. Damaged by enemy bombs, she was floating without power when a Japanese submarine torpedo sent her to the bottom.

  CHAPTER 12